Liberals bloggers and readers of Daily Kos have been getting together at an annual convention, and it turns out -- surprise, surprise -- that when you see them in person, this latest manifestation of civil society consists of a whole bunch of white males. From the
A Diversity of Opinion, if Not Opinionators
At the Yearly Kos Bloggers' Convention, a Sea of Middle-Aged White Males
By Jose Antonio Vargas
CHICAGO, Aug. 5 -- It's Sunday, day 4 of Yearly Kos, the major conference for progressive bloggers, and Gina Cooper, the confab's organizer-in-chief, surveys the ballroom of the massive McCormick Place Convention Center. A few hundred remaining conventioneers are having brunch, dining on eggs, bagels and sausage.
Seven of the eight Democratic presidential candidates have paid their respects this weekend, and some 200 members of the credentialed press have filed their stories. A mere curiosity just two years ago, the progressive blogosphere has gone mainstream. But Cooper sees a problem.
"It's mostly white. More male than female," says the former high school math and science teacher turned activist. "It's not very diverse."
There goes the open secret of the netroots, or those who make up the community of the Internet grass-roots movement.
For all the talk about the increasing influence of this growing group -- "We are a community . . . a movement . . . an institution," Cooper said in a speech Saturday night -- what gets scant attention is its demography. While the Huffington Post and
Walking around
Historically, the progressive movement has included a myriad of special-interest and single-issue groups, and the challenge has always been to find common ground. The same is true on the Internet, but with an added twist. The Internet, after all, is not a "push" medium like television, where information flows out, but a "pull" medium, where people are drawn in.
Build a liberal site such as Daily Kos, as the Persian Gulf War veteran and former Republican Markos "Kos" Moulitsas Zuniga did five years ago, and bloggers either join the discussion or not. For two years now, Moulitsas has lent his name to the conference. But on Saturday, Cooper announced that next year the event will be called "Netroots Nation."
Cooper is worried about generating more "inclusion," using the word no less than six times in 15 minutes. ...
It's hard to think of another movement that has affected politics in such a short period of time, and the blogging culture is an informal, friendly community that has no one leader or single issue -- except, perhaps, strong opposition to the war in Iraq. Last year's Blogads Reader Survey found that the median political blog reader is a 43-year-old male who has an annual family income of $80,000, and judging by the number of middle-aged men who attended one panel after the next here, it's hard to argue with that. ...
Stoller half-jokingly says that the netroots community is full of "white liberal men," then quickly points out that Moulitsas is part Latino. (The other half is Greek.)
A lot of the influential segments of American society are almost as white male-dominated as in 1960, especially those where affirmative action doesn't apply, such as at liberal netroots conferences or as CEOs of Fortune 500 firms, which are about 99% white.
Political blogging, for example, is overwhelmingly dominated by white males, plus the occasional upper-caste Indian. Writing
In general, white males still tend to most of the interesting new things in the world.
So why are semi-elite non-quota organizations staying white male-dominated? Here are some hypotheses, focusing on the liberal netroots issue, but more widely applicable as well. Of course, they are, based on statistical generalizations. (I realize that thinking statistically is politically incorrect, but the universe works stochastically):
- Apparently, African-Americans have in recent decades tended to lose interest in fields that they can't dominate numerically and thus culturally: e.g., they've come to dominate the NBA and NFL, while losing interest in baseball. Blacks don't seem to want to be tokens anymore. For instance, from 1964-1986, five different black guys won a total of 23 PGA golf tournaments. In the last 20 years, however, only the 1/4th black Tiger Woods has won anything on the PGA.
Going to a netroots conference, for instance, probably strikes most black guys as something for particularly lame white nerds.
- Hispanics are vastly under-represented in most influential fields of civil society, perhaps for deep cultural reasons -- e.g., there's little civil society in
What's particularly striking is the under-representation of Hispanics, who now make up 1-7th of the residents of the country, in just about any quasi-elite organization, other than legislatures where the Voting Rights Act mandates the creation of majority-minority districts, and other affirmative-action influenced entities.
That Matthew Yglesias is on the verge of being the best-known Spanish-surnamed pundit in the country is bizarrely ironic.
- East Asians are doing well, but tend to be a little less assertive and little less interested in politics and the like.
- Women just aren't that interested in broadcasting their opinions to the world. They love to tell you their opinions personally, but telling the world about how to reform telecom policy tends to strike them as a waste of time.
- So, that leaves the main exception, South Asians, who tend to be very well-educated, quite verbal, and quite interested in politics and public affairs.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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53 comments:
I'm having trouble thinking of South Asian polibloggers. There's GNXP but their traffic isn't all due to politics--the most highly-trafficked mainstream blogs don't seem aware of their existence, notwithsanding some tussles they had with a few lefty blogs in their early days. Other than them I can't think of any, especially not among the most well-known/trafficked political blogs.
Whereas I can think of at least on example of other minority groups among the top blogs: Kos himself, the top lefty blog, is half-latino. Malkin, roughly the top righty blogger, is Filipina. Oliver Willis and LaShawn Barber are black.
As a white woman blogger, going on seven years now...
Most women are too wimpy to handle the abuse they get online. Even compliments sometimes come across as brusque insults, since they're often semi-sarcastic.
I've developed a fairly thick skin, but it is still penetrable and I'll lapse into a brief funk following a particularly nasty exchange. (Men are supposed to be logical, but how does "You're ugly and need to get laid -- so I'll rape you" make sense, exactly...?)
But I've been at this too long to quit now.
Steve: Other than Razib, are there any other influential Indian Bloggers? Maybe I don't get out enough, but I don't know of any.
I think there are a couple obvious explanations for this, beyond the usual bell-curve type stuff.
a. I have also observed the tendency of blacks to stay out of fields with few blacks, and crowd into fields with lots of blacks. I suspect this is an adaptation to the fear of discrimination. (The fear may be reasonable or not.) If you expect that some fields will have a lot of discrimination, and others will not, it's rational using number of blacks in the field as a first approximation to how much extra crap you're going to catch going into that field with black skin.
b. Immigrants from Latin America are overwhelmingly not the educated elite from their own country (who would be good at doing the opinion blogging thing, albeit in Spanish), and 1st/2nd generation immigrants tend to be more focused on financial well being than on ideas.
I'm not sure how much of the phenomenon either of these explains.
Another reason women aren’t into blogging is the thick skin required in a hostile field.
I don’t agree completely that they don’t want to broadcast their opinion in general, there are plenty of non-political female blogs (diaries about personal life and the like). The discrepancy is in political blogging. Or maybe topic specific blogging in general.
Bloggers need to be competetive but also obsessed to succed. The Simon Baron-Cohen model fits well here.
Kos himself is half El-Salvadoran. And not a veteran of the Gulf War, which the Post incorrectly claims.
"Hispanics are vastly under-represented in most influential fields of civil society, perhaps for deep cultural reasons -- e.g., there's little civil society in Mexico."
When the economy is good in Mexico, the more Amerindian looking Hispanics don't mind being lorded over by the white Mexican elite which is only 12%-17% of the population.
If the economy remains solid in the US and there is a cutoff in low-skill Hispanic immigration in the future, Hispanics will remain much less inclined to fight the white American middle class power structure the way blacks have.
"East Asians are doing well, but tend to be a little less assertive and little less interested in politics and the like."
That is because the verbal agility of East Asians lags quite a bit behind whites and Jews.
Since they lack verbal grace, it is harder for East Asians to make headway in civil affairs.
Further, East Asians may be uninterested in US politics because, while Asians don't really like the GOP and they lean liberal, they aren't interested in forming political alliances with poor blacks and Hispanics so Asians tend not to get involved in politics at all.
On a similar note, East Asians lack interest in US politics because they have no real historical axe to grind with whites.
"So, that leaves the main exception, South Asians, who tend to be very well-educated, quite verbal, and quite interested in politics and public affairs."
That is true, upper caste Indians have strong verbal skills and seem interested in US politics much more than other immigrant ethnic groups.
Old Right
This isn't terribly surprising to me, and I doubt it comes as much of a shock to anyone who routinely reads iSteve, VDARE, GNXP or Inductivist. It seems that, beyond a very vocal minority, that non-whites in the US aren't interested in politics (except, of course, when it directly affects their ethnic group).
I live in a fairly 'diverse' area (2005 US Census estimates: 69% non-Hispanic white, 23% black, 3% Hispanic, 2.5% Asian, 1% Native American). I have attended my community's Earth Day festivities every year for more than a decade. About 4 years back I started taking a careful look at the demographics of the crowd. As you probably have guessed: at least 90% non-Hispanic white. Amongst the minority population, there were more Native Americans there than blacks and Hispanics combined. Economically/socially/chronologically the crowd demo was all over the place - but still almost completely lily-white.
Based on observations like mine, and the Yearly Kos article, that minority participation in progressive institutions is grossly underrepresented - a particular irony considering that the stated goal of such institutions is to promote the welfare of those same minorities. . .
Arrg! I forgot about Reihan!
This is absolutely idiotic!!!
By a huge margin the biggest political blogsite is leftist DailyKos, founded by Markos Zuniga, who grew up in El Salvador, speaking Spanish as his native language (although admittedly his father is Greek). The blogger convention in question is called "YearlyKos," which he co-founded, and many of the other prominent Left bloggers got their start on DailyKos.
Last time I checked, darkish-skinned Spanish-speaking immigrants from El Salvador were generally considered "Latino"...
Casually talking about the near-complete absence of Latino bloggers in discussing the DailyKos website and convention is therefore a little like talking about the near-complete absence of German-American baseball sluggers in American history while discussing the amazing deeds of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
Although both the idiotic NYT (and much more surprisingly) iSteve both make this ridiculous mistake, I think it actually highlights a point which Steve may have once made, namely that successful, well-educated, and non-ethnic-activist Latinos in America are somehow no longer considered "Latino," hence skew the mental image/model of that particular ethnic group.
Mathew Yglesias doesn't look the slightest bit non-white. What's his ethnic background?
Indians are more closely related to European Caucasians than they are to East Asians. Furthermore, a large percentage of Indian immigrants to the U.S. are college educated and from the top part of the Indian IQ distribution, so it's not surprising that they act like more smart white white people than other races.
Disgruntled white guys attracted to Socialist Worker protest poltics ... real motive: they inwardly perceive themselves to be losers and resent the winners.
Guys like that could easily flip over into National Socialist politics. It happened in Germany.
Or are a large percentage of the Kossacks mixed breeds whose real motive is resentment of 100 percent whites? I don't know.
Those motives aren't mutually exclusive.
Conventioneering (as a hobby and not because your boss sent you) seems to be a guy thing. I suspect that in terms of readership, the Dailykos has much less of a gender gap.
It is interesting that most prominent bloggers are male. I wonder how much of that is that, as with movie heroes and authors, men much prefer listening to other guys while women are more open to crossing enemy lines. Women will go see Matt Damon and Will Smith or read Dr. Phil and Dan Brown, how many men go to a Julia Roberts movie or read an Oprah Winfrey book, except under duress?
For whatever reason, gender is certainly a bigger divide than ethnicity. The uber-blogger, Markos Moulsitas (who's actually a pretty good guy, a lesser man would have turned into a jerk by now from all the adulation) is likely the most politically influential Hispanic in America. And though he spent a large chunk of his childhood growing up in El Salvador, no one thinks of him as a Latino blogger, anymore than the half-Mexican James Jesus Angleton is remembered as a Latino intelligence official.
Likewise, the late Steve Gilliard was day in and day out, the best liberal blogger. Gilliard, who died earlier this year, was a phenomenal writer-- the most perceptive military history writer this side of William Lind. I read his blog for months before it dawned on me he was black.
Mr iSteve, why do you take pains to point out the Jewish heritage of supposed Hispanic Yglesias, but at the same time describe the Kos crowd as "white" and the screenwriters as simply "white"?
Can we not assume that the Kos crowd and the screenwriter community, leftwing demographic bastions both, are heavily Jewish? And specifically persons who identify racially as apart from whites? Is that not relevant to the discussion?
I thought this blog was about racial and ethnic realities. If that is the case, it's absurd to lump Jews in with whites. Jews are a monolithic ethnic voting bloc in America who are strongly opposed to the political leanings of the vast majority of whites.
I find this aspect of the article particularly annoying because the silly Hispanic category is by definition not ethnic or racial, but linguistic. Therefore anyone with a Hispanic surname apparently qualifies for the category.
So, therefore it is equally silly that a Jew such as Yglesias could be a nationally recognized as "Hispanic" on a technicality, as a group of middle-age leftist radicals could be recognized simply as "white". Yet you gloss over the latter.
The fact is that the Hispanic category and the non-existent Jewish demographic category (which is tied directly to the non-existence of a Middle-Eastern demographic category [yes, any incoming Iraqi refugees are going to "white" according to the government]) are all evidence of a bogus US government census bureau.
So, Mr iSteve, why not point out to the reader all of the demographic hijinks relevant to an article - instead of just focusing on the Hispanic silliness?
That is because the verbal agility of East Asians lags quite a bit behind whites and Jews.
Since they lack verbal grace, it is harder for East Asians to make headway in civil affairs.
Now there is a stereotype from someone who has not had much to do with East Asians.
"Further, East Asians may be uninterested in US politics because, while Asians don't really like the GOP and they lean liberal, they aren't interested in forming political alliances with poor blacks and Hispanics so Asians tend not to get involved in politics at all."
I beg to differ with you, Old Right. Some East Asians are intensely motivated to be activists. In the Houston area where there are large communities of Asians who cannot be assimilated due to sheer numbers, Asians are apt to be as reactionary as blacks and Hispanics when it comes to identity politics. There are enough of them now that a significant number have settled at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap. Despite the fact that few whites live anywhere near these communities, Asian politicians assume the lack of upward mobility in their communities is caused by white racism.
I surmise there are two main reasons for this. The younger generations have been educated in schools dominated by cultural marxism. Also, more recent East Asian immigrants are the poorer, less educated members of their societies. The combination of the two trends guarantees yet another "minority" group will attempt to cash in on identity politics.
I have experienced some of their wrath myself though I don't understand how Asians came to see themselves as connected to any controversy surrounding me or my political beliefs. The only thing I can think stirred the hornets nest was that I had an Asian male arrested because he was in my bedroom when I came home. He had made some frightening if not threatening remarks to me a few weeks earlier. Since I had done nothing to anger him in any way, I took the words and the subsequent trespassing very seriously. Did the Asian community believe on of theirs couldn't possibly be psychotic? They've probably revised their opinions since then but it's way too late to undo the damage done to my reputation.
Of the (very broadly defined) political pundits of Indian origin, Reihan Salam, Razib Khan and Fareed Zakaria are all of a Muslim background, not high caste Hindu.
On another point, Sikhs are big in Canadian politics, much more so than any other minority group. And they are heavily involved in both the Liberal and Conservative parties. Our quasi-socialist New Democratic Party is lily white.
It would be interesting for someone to compile a list of societial participation/support by race/culture. This would include things such as volunteerism, charity, adoption, protesting abstract or community-wide issues (excluding those driven by self-interest).
Given that blogging is usually an economic altruistic act (if often misguided), I suspect one would find lilly-white participation in these areas as well.
On communicating with male bloggers
I could handle the occasional sexist remark or even the kind of insane obsession with Marilyn Monroe's reproductive system that I've seen on iSteve. Though it did leave me wondering that some of the bloggers were in maximum security somewhere. The only thing that upsets me is the ultra-personal data mining I've had to endure. This did not deter me as intended. Instead, I felt driven to find out all I could about the boys harassing me. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer...
Want to get rid of women on your site? Try just being the boring, blockheads you are. We'll get bored and leave soon enough.
This is probably another case of political maneuvering on the part of some people in the nutroots community.
If you have the rank and file running around worrying about lack of diversity they will not notice that some individuals are making a grab for power.
"Apparently, African-Americans have in recent decades tended to lose interest in fields that they can't dominate numerically and thus culturally: e.g., they've come to dominate the NBA and NFL, while losing interest in baseball. Blacks don't seem to want to be tokens anymore."
This is just maddening. I love reading Steve's blog, but these casual, sweeping assertions drive me crazy. It has been heavily documented in L.A., where Steve lives, that youth baseball programs in the inner-city have disappeared over the past 30 years. Might this be why there are less blacks playing baseball, given that similar declines have occurred in big cities across the nation? Of course.
This reminds me of the post he had about the percentage of blacks on the "dream teams" sent to the U.S. Olympics, as if that was telling about why the teams did or didn't succeed as opposed to the U.S. officials' bizarre insistence on putting together teams without loads of outside shooters, who are far more important in international basketball because of the rules.
There are tons of lefty mommy bloggers whose content is 1/2-2/3rds political. It should be obvious why they don't go to conventions. It's obvious, right? Please tell me I don't have to explain this.
"That is because the verbal agility of East Asians lags quite a bit behind whites and Jews.
Since they lack verbal grace, it is harder for East Asians to make headway in civil affairs."
The data supporting a lower East Asian verbal IQ is pretty weak, if not nonexistent. If you look at SAT verbal scores by ethnic group, the Asian average is not much below the non-hispanic white average, even though a sizeable number of Asian test-takers don't come from English speaking homes (many are even recent immigrants). If you correct for that environmental handicap, the verbal average may well be higher for Asians. (It's also true that the Asian category that ETS uses includes some south-east asian groups like Hmong or Filipino that drag down the NE Asian averages -- it's been remarked before that the variance of the collective "Asian" group is extremely large.)
However, it is true that East Asians are socialized to be (and may even be genetically predisposed to be) less pushy and aggressive. That probably means more to this discussion than the mythical verbal IQ gap.
alex: I'm having trouble thinking of South Asian polibloggers. There's GNXP but their traffic isn't all due to politics--the most highly-trafficked mainstream blogs don't seem aware of their existence, notwithsanding some tussles they had with a few lefty blogs in their early days. Other than them I can't think of any, especially not among the most well-known/trafficked political blogs.
Dude?
Ramesh Ponnuru, Dinesh D'Souza, Bobby Jindal?!?
BTW, The Derb has been warning us that we're losing Asians left and right to the DEM's [he's gone so far as to intimate that Mrs. The Derb cancels his vote in each election], and I've read that we're losing the 2nd & 3rd generation offspring of the various boatpeoples [Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, even Cuban] to the politics of victimology.
So this recent story warmed my heart to no end [scroll down to #10, "Brains and Beauty" - WE SCORE!!! WE SCORE!!! WE SCORE!!!]
50 Most Beautiful People on Capitol Hill
Top 10
40 More
A couple meta-points:
1) My guess is that to the extent that American conservatives are coming out of the Indian subcontinent, it's because they reflect [what you might call an older "High"] British culture, rather than any sort of native [pagan] culture.
2) Furthermore, my guess is that to the extent that the GOP makes inroads with "Asian" Americans [be their ancestors from the Indian subcontinent, or the Pacific Rim], it's because of their reception of Christianity.
For instance, I'd guess that a born-again Christian, like a Michael Chang, is far more likely to become a GOP-er, than, say, any of the plurality 49.3% of South Koreans who are atheists [were they to emigrate to America].
Indeed, if you read about The Hill's #10, "Brains and Beauty", you see that:
Jamie Skipper was in church when she noticed a handsome man across the pews singing along to the hymns. And boy, did she pray. "Lord, I want a guy like that someday," she said to herself and to God...
Skipper is a native of Chicago but both parents are from India — something that had worried her when it came to the issue of marriage. The handsome man in church soon became her boyfriend, but he was American and Caucasian, far from what she thought her parents would ever accept...
So again, she prayed: "Lord, if this is OK, give me a sign."
The sign came from the fact that her parents immediately took to her husband-to-be, Matt Skipper, and loved him from the start. And she knew.
"It came from a lot of praying," she says.
3) When all is said and done, Dubyah's great legacy will not have been this silly little skirmish with these Muslim nutcases, or [let us hope] even the great invasion from South o' the Border - but rather, it will have been his quiet, presistent, behind-the-scenes strengthening of our ties with the peoples of India, Mainland China, and even Japan.
Ha! :D Funny article,as I read about this "bloggers" meeting,and the article was illustrated with the picture of some middle-aged white woman in deep,deep concentraion typing away at her laptop with her profound opinions,and I thought:Who's gonna read this chicks stuff? Women in the media(with notable exceptions like Georgeanne Geyer,who has all but overome her gender!)are dull,boring and say little. Think Anna Quindlen! :0 I thought:(like the New Age people say)"as above,so below"! Kinda reminds me of the Beatles song,"For No One".
Yglesias is, as far as I can tell from clues on his blog, at least 50%, and maybe as much as 75%, Askenazi Jewish. His father's father was a white Cuban immigrant (and quite the pre-Castro lefty) who I think married a Jewish woman.
As far as the MSM is concerned, white Cubans with no apparent admixture don't usually count as "Latinos" when trying to make a political point (Desi Arnaz and Andy Garcia seldom get lauded as "pioneers"), so only a demi-Cuban like Yglesias would get even less credit. He might as well be a Spaniard.
Steve, you summed it all up perfectly in an old article:
The unmentionable truth: human beings like to hang out with people like themselves.
And they will develop institutions to allow them to do so.
So where are the Hispanics, blacks and Asians?
Yes, hanging out with each other on their own networks, blogs, forums, etc.
Mystery solved!
Perhaps American blacks prefer to compete in fields with lots of other blacks because they fear reverse-racism.
That is, a black in a white occupation is presumed to be an affirmative-action hireling whose qualifications are at the very bottom of the ability range for his job. That will be true 90+% of the time so even a highly competent black man will find it nearly impossible to get the respect he deserves. In fields with many blacks, competition among them will select and certify those worthy of respect.
When "affirmative action" was new, almost 40 years ago, people in general trusted job titles and roles as markers of legitimate status. If you walked into a bank and there were several tellers free, you could expect the black one to know the business as well as any. Affirmative-action hiring has eroded that trust. Nowadays, job titles and roles only indicate relative status among pale people. The policy of giving many blacks jobs they don't deserve has deprived all the other blacks of the respect they do deserve. Now when you walk into that bank, you must avoid the black teller, because he probably can't can't do simple arithmetic in his head.
(When you do choose a pale teller because you plan to ask a question about the variable interest rate on your money-market checking account, the black teller whose window you walk past will tag you as a "racist." Thus does reverse-racism provoke behavior that resembles actual racism, even though it stems from entirely different motives. Sometimes this effect is called "statistical racism," but the problem is not racism. The problem is that affirmative-action deprives ordinary signals of their meaning.
(A white coat and a stethoscope used to mean "among the most qualified 15% of medical school applicants." Now it means that only for pale people. For blacks, it means--nearly always--"among the least qualified of medical school applicants." Which doctor do you want to consult? And if you really are a smart black doctor, how can anyone tell? The uniform isn't enough!)
I find this aspect of the article particularly annoying because the silly Hispanic category is by definition not ethnic or racial, but linguistic. Therefore anyone with a Hispanic surname apparently qualifies for the category.
You don't even need an Hispanic surname: Vicente Fox has an Anglo-Saxon surname and Carlos Slim has a modified Levantine surname. Salma Hayek also has a Levantine-Assyrian surname.
Steve --
A couple of points.
Kos is NOT a Gulf War Vet. He is a vet but did not serve in the Gulf War.
Second, I think you are missing the big point: it's the economics stupid (to quote Bill Clinton).
White male elitist liberals (who contrary to popular opinion don't fear being "losers" but want to control the populace through an aristocracy) have the time and money required for blogging.
For blogging you need a computer, which is not free. Time to devote to blogging, which is not free. Generally, your own site if traffic ramps up (which costs). Technical expertise in such things as HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL to maintain your site or the money to hire someone to do it. Enough free time/money to develop a plan to get your site more attention. And so on.
Women don't care to do these things since if they are married they get the bulk of the housework and child-care. If they are single status from blogging doesn't do anything for them, in fact it detracts from their time in the gym and other activities to keep them thin and beautiful to attract the higher status guy. Whereas even a lame-o pseudo-celebrity via blogging can attract a lot of women.
You've probably seen the VH1 show about that lame-o pick-up artist trying to show even lamer nerds how to pick up women. His whole secret is he pretends to be a grade z celebrity and it works.
Liberal white male bloggers blog because it gets them women (or they hope it does) for the most part. Some just like to express their "forbidden" thoughts that PC-Multiculturalism prevents from being expressed. Women don't care about their own status only beauty. And most minorities have neither the time/money nor the computer skills needed to follow it.
Bloggers start blogging because they hope it'll attract women? What a crock of shite that is! Simple truth is, some people like an audience, and it doesn't matter if that audience numbers 10 or 10 million.
In general, white males still tend to most of the interesting new things in the world.
It's this self-congratulation that makes iSteve occasionally difficult to read.
Kos himself is half El-Salvadoran. And not a veteran of the Gulf War, which the Post incorrectly claims.
Yes, and which some of us have emailed the WaPo about without getting a correction. They rival The New Republic when it comes to fact-checking and fact-correcting.
Kos is pretty white, too. Judging by the cast of his face, I imagine he probably does have a very small amount of admixture. But most people who never knew the guy was part Hispanic would never guess he was anything but white.
woman scorned: Want to get rid of women on your site? Try just being the boring, blockheads you are. We'll get bored and leave soon enough.
Dear Scorned,
Care to let us see the super-secret Bat Decoder Ring so that we'll know how to not bore you?
Hmmm... That doesn't sound quite right... ;)
Anyway, give us some tips on how to appeal to your sense of fascination.
"If you look at SAT verbal scores by ethnic group, the Asian average is not much below the non-hispanic white average, even though a sizeable number of Asian test-takers don't come from English speaking homes (many are even recent immigrants)."
Thanks for the information.
Still, East Asians are fairly well off, and have IQs comparable to Jews and yet they seem to be punching below their weight in politics and literature compared to whites and Jews (Not that I would want them to become too involved in US politics mind you...)
This makes me think that in some way their verbal skills are lacking.
Old Right
Re: Ramesh Ponnuru, Dinesh D'Souza, Bobby Jindal
Well, but they're actual authors and a poltician. If we’re just talking about professional journalists then we can add a large number of black names and even a few Hispanics. I'm talking about people who blog to blog, not as an appendage of a real job. I admit it can be blurry, as in the case of Malkin, but none of these guys is distinctive as a blogger. I didn't know Jindal was even blogging--where? But still, they write posts on the internet throughout the day, that's blogging, so I take your point.
Old Right,
Re; East Asians, they're still largely an immigrant population, and the gap between E Asian languages and Indo-European languages is quite vast. (Just count the number of cognates (similar words) in, say, Hindi and English and you will see why it is much easier for an Indian to learn any European language than a Japanese.)
All the NE Asian countries have long and well-developed literary traditions. The consumption rate of books in those countries is very high.
Asians have high IQ but low testosterone. Blacks have high testosterone but low IQ. In America, the political sweet spot is in the middle, where you find all the whites.
When Asians really care about something, they don't "stir up trouble" over it, they just bribe white politicians.
"Bloggers blog to attract women"...now that is a scarey notion!
re:"b. Immigrants from Latin America are overwhelmingly not the educated elite from their own country (who would be good at doing the opinion blogging thing, albeit in Spanish), and 1st/2nd generation immigrants tend to be more focused on financial well being than on ideas.
I'm not sure how much of the phenomenon either of these explains."
I think that actually explains quite a lot. Consider the vast difference between how South Asians are perceived in the US with how Latino are perceived. South Asians immigrants to the US tend to be disproportionately Upper Caste Hindus or Upper Class educated Muslims (I would estimate these groups have an average IQ well over 100). OTOH immigrant Latinos tend to be overwhemingly working class mestizo or mulattos with an average IQ of between 88 -90. This explains a lot, whether we're talking representation in blogging, politics, or for that matter, economic success. OTOH, if the majority of Indian immigrants consisted of low IQ low caste Hindu untouchables, I suspect you'd see very different perceptions of South Asian immigrants.
re:"I think it actually highlights a point which Steve may have once made, namely that successful, well-educated, and non-ethnic-activist Latinos in America are somehow no longer considered "Latino," hence skew the mental image/model of that particular ethnic group."
I suspect so as well. I know quite a few highly educated Latinos of European background (Spanish, Italian, German...even one Irish Bolivian redhead!!!!) who consider themselves (and are considered by others) to be white.
Similarly, despite the 'cultural richness' of Mexico and Ethiopia, for some reason whenever white American liberals threaten to leave, or actually do leave the US, it's always for Canada, New Zealand, or Sweden. All of this is purely coincidental, of course.
So now is the time to demand that minorities be mandated their fair share of postings on Dailykos.
- Apparently, African-Americans have in recent decades tended to lose interest in fields that they can't dominate numerically and thus culturally: e.g., they've come to dominate the NBA and NFL, while losing interest in baseball.
Dear Mr. Steve Sailer,
At some point in the future you might want to explain your theory of the inverse.
- Have whites lost interest in basketball because they don't dominate it?
- Why have whites, who dominate baseball, lost interest in the sport?
- Why do blacks continue to insist on playing quarterback despite not dominating the position? Why does it seem like the % of black QBs is growing and not declining?
- Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the typical DKos poster was more likely to be not-white than the typical TNR writer, but I have no data on this.
For the record, I'm white, I post on DKos, and even though I live in Vegas, i did not attend Ykos last year because it didn't seem like a cool thing to do. Also, I'm a lame white nerd who blogs a bit.
"Have whites lost interest in basketball because they don't dominate it?"
Yes, I think it's likely that tall, athletic white American guys aren't going all out for basketball as much anymore, probably due to black dominance of the game. Who was the last white American All-Star game player? Brad Miller a few years ago? There are remarkably few white American NBA stars of any magnitude these days, especially compared to the number of white European, South American, and Canadian stars.
I suspect that white guys who could have done well in the NBA are getting guided by their parents into whiter sports like playing goalie in soccer, pitching in baseball, or perhaps lacrosse.
Similarly, I think the rise of Kenyan distance runners took the heart out of white American distance runners. Back in the 1960s, three white high school boys ran the mile in under four minutes, but then Kip Keino beat one of them, Jim Ryun, in the 1968 Olympics and it was about a third of a century before another white high school boy broke the 4 minute barrier.
By Anonymous, at 8/07/2007 2:18 PM said "It is this self-congratulation that makes iSteve sometimes difficult to read."
The truth hurts, doesn't it?
Yes, I think it's likely that tall, athletic white American guys aren't going all out for basketball as much anymore, probably due to black dominance of the game. Who was the last white American All-Star game player? Brad Miller a few years ago? There are remarkably few white American NBA stars of any magnitude these days, especially compared to the number of white European, South American, and Canadian stars.
I suspect that white guys who could have done well in the NBA are getting guided by their parents into whiter sports like playing goalie in soccer, pitching in baseball, or perhaps lacrosse.
I think the biggest problem for whites in basketball has been the change in the nature of the game.
As recently as about the mid-1980's, basketball was still a very fluid, graceful game, in which a player with great learned skills - but not necessarily with such great inherent athleticism - could excel at the game.
But as David Stern allowed the game to descend into chaos in the late 1980's, especially with the rise of Chuck Daly & the Detroit "Bad Boys", the game became so violent that whites just couldn't compete at it any more.
Enforce the rulebook [much less physical contact, no travelling, no walking, no palming, no hooking, etc], and white guys can compete.
But, by and large, in a game of jungle ball [lots of physical contact - leaning, holding, grabbing, elbowing, shoving; superstar rules, where superstars can take 3 or 4 steps without dribbling before they dunk the ball, or where superstars are allowed to palm the ball while making their "move"], and white guys are up a creek without a paddle.
By the way, you see the converse of this in international play nowadays: When the refs enforce the rules [FIBA championships, Olympics, etc], it turns out that white guys can compete [because skills like perimeter shooting become important again] - and not only compete, but win - while the players of the [generally 100% African-American] USA team are proved to be the poseurs that really they are.
PS: To a certain extent, I think this is also coming to be true of modern football. The game is getting so violent [with e.g. defensive players accelerating to 25MPH+ and delivering forearm shots to the head, or accelerating to similar speeds and lowering their heads and using their helmets as battering rams], that a lot of guys are looking at the contact they would have to absorb, and saying to themselves, "Uh, no thanks."
And don't tell me that it's always been that way. I saw a special on Chuck Bednarik a while back - Bednarik was the last man to play both ways [center on offense, linebacker on defense, on the 1960 championship team] - and he was widely regarded as the meanest, nastiest dude to ever play the game.
But Bednarik's style [like all the other players of his day] was to run up next to a player, grab him with his arms, and wrestle him to the ground.
I think the idea that you should lower your head and use your helmet as a battering ram would have struck even 1950's or 1960's era football players as insane - because even that recently, they all understood that your skull is the bone which contains your brain.
And similarly, I doubt that the referees of that era would have allowed the forearm shivers to the skull that offensive players are routine expected to absorb nowadays - I imagine that kinduva shot would have gotten the defender ejected from the game.
As my brother says, if the NFL doesn't tone down the violence, then pretty soon, they're gonna be leaving somebody dead on the field.
... and the non-existent Jewish demographic category (which is tied directly to the non-existence of a Middle-Eastern demographic category ...
What are you trying to say? You think there should be an official Jewish category, along with "white" or Hispanic"?
White male elitist liberals (who contrary to popular opinion don't fear being "losers" but want to control the populace through an aristocracy) have the time and money required for blogging.
For blogging you need a computer, which is not free. Time to devote to blogging, which is not free. Generally, your own site if traffic ramps up (which costs). Technical expertise in such things as HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL to maintain your site or the money to hire someone to do it. Enough free time/money to develop a plan to get your site more attention. And so on.
Read the news. Kos and his buddy get paid to tout politicians and Linux stocks. Kos is a wannabe eilitist.
... in fact it detracts from their time in the gym and other activities to keep them thin and beautiful to attract the higher status guy ...
We can guess who furtively ogles girls at the gym.
... Whereas even a lame-o pseudo-celebrity via blogging can attract a lot of women.
It sure works for Steve! How women throw themselves at him! ( He won't admit that here, cuz he's still married. )
Kos is pretty white, too. ...
But most people who never knew the guy was part Hispanic would never guess he was anything but white.
No, Kos definitely looks to be a mixed breed.
(Just count the number of cognates (similar words) in, say, Hindi and English and you will see why it is much easier for an Indian to learn any European language than a Japanese.)
Hindi IS an Indo-European language. Hence the "Indo" part of the label. The Indian caste system exists because Caucasoids - Aryans, if you'll pardon the expression -- invaded the subcontinent thousands of years ago and interbred with the conquered locals. Contemporary higher caste Indians are usually paler skinned.
...whenever white American liberals threaten to leave, or actually do leave the US, it's always for Canada, New Zealand, or Sweden
Indeed. That is the macro white migration direction. Rarely do they go to nations that are the dusky jewels of the planet.
And the micro migration is almost always from a darker to a whiter neighborhood also. The number of white liberal families who move to minority majority neighborhoods is tiny. Those that do bless us with red diaper babies.
It wouldn't matter if the available destinations were neighborhoods, states, nations or planets. For a liberal social justice means enforced diversity for those must who stick around when society darkens, and pleasant safe white society for those who have the means to escape.
When you think about it, the hypocrite white liberal diversity escape artist is one of the sickest things on this planet.
To the guy who thinks Markos looks "mixed-breed", you must consider mediterranean whites as a different breed than northern european whites. Markos couldn't pass for German, but he could pass for Italian or Spanish or Greek.
"I think it actually highlights a point which Steve may have once made, namely that successful, well-educated, and non-ethnic-activist Latinos in America are somehow no longer considered "Latino," hence skew the mental image/model of that particular ethnic group."
Go back and look up the Cheney shotgun incident. Half the guys Bush and Cheney were out hunting with had Spanish last names. Though somehow I doubt that even if Cheney had hit one of them that the NYT would have run the headline "Cheney shoots Hispanic bigwig in hunting accident".
Many years ago (about 1989), I had occasion to attend the California Republican Party convention, and the North American Students of Co-operation convention within a few months of each other. NASCO is a very granola-lefty organization; it's a group of student-housing cooperatives from around the U.S. and Canada.
The NASCO convention was noticeably whiter, with most of the non-whites present being part of the Berkeley contingent.
Berkeley's student co-ops were about half the price of the dorms, and had a "strong committment to diversity" in its political operations. So we had lots of non-white members, and exercised AA in selecting who got the plum of going to NASCO.
Asian-Americans don't punch their weight in literature because they're receiving a terrible education in literature. Do you know what high school freshmen read in California? Sherman Alexie and Maya Angelou. I doubt it's much better in the other states. And it's not culturally permissable on a broad scale for Asian Americans to sit around and read, and they don't have the writing community that the Jews or the Irish. Add that to the fact that they're completely failed by the educational system in this area, and you have your explanation.
Markos couldn't pass for German, but he could pass for Italian or Spanish or Greek.
"Pass for"? What do you mean?
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